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It really is just a big ball that hangs in the middle of the room with four projectors pointed at it.

The SoS system requires that crazy projection. It cuts the frame into four parts and feeds those to the four projectors around the sphere, along with some darkening around the edges to keep the blended image even. They project the image (or video) onto the sphere and it's like you have a planet (or whatever you want) floating in the middle of the room.

The workflow goes something like this:

In Blender, a six camera cluster with cameras pointing front, left, right, up, back, and down renders the scene into six 90º views. These views are stitched into the required projection by Hugin. We use a python script to get Blender to change cameras and output path during command line render and we use a shell script to tell Hugin what to do with the frames! Easy, right? ;)

(We're still figuring out the best way to do this, so the workflow might change if we find a faster/better way of doing things.)

The equidistant cylindrical projection can be seen here:

A 3D mockup of the data on a sphere can be seen here:

http://vimeo.com/9634218

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I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-)

How far are you with the realiation of the project? Did you find algorithms / logarithms to map or morph the 2D-files into 3D? Or did you just work on an arbitrary basis? I am actually working on a similar project, planned to be an java-application and still researching methods and maths... so if you like, I'd love to talk to you to share experiences.
all the best or this project: p3t3